In Japan, cigarette packages carry this warning: [Smoking] "May possibly harm your health, so please be careful not to smoke too much -- and please observe good smoking manners."

To us, this is evidence of balance, and respect for the truth. Perhaps these two gifts -- obviously long lost in our society -- are what have contributed to make Japan a great country, with immense economic power, and an ancient culture.

Of course, this balanced attitude about smoking very much displeases the domestic and international antismoking activists, who see in Japan a potential beacon of the very intelligence and realism they are so desperately trying to suppress.

On the topic of Japan, and smoking in general, the Washington Post has recently stated in an article that "Not every society... has yet come to an equal understanding of the dangers of smoking".

Of course... Japan, such a backward country, how can they possibly understand the dangers of smoking!? Or, perhaps Japan has not come to an equal understanding of the gains of lying. Long may it be so.

In the same article, the Post goes on to mention a 10-volume "ground-breaking study" called "The Global Burden of Disease" sponsored by the (US-controlled, who else?) World Health Organization, the World Bank and the Harvard School of Public Health and written and researched by Christopher J. L. Murray and Alan D. Lopez.

"The authors found that tobacco is already the single most important cause of years lost to disability and early death in both the prosperous Western nations and the former Soviet bloc. In both regions, it causes nearly one in seven deaths."

At this time, we are unaware of the contents of the above-mentioned study, and we'll come back to it after reading it.

But what is evident now is that the WHO is preparing a full-scale antismoking attack on the rest of the world. This fall's convention in Europe will probably mark the beginning of a planetary-scale aggression on smoking, smokers, and tobacco companies.

Why are the USA and their Canadian moppets so interested in the well-being of the rest of the world? Is it because they love their neighbours so much, and care for them? Of course not. The reasons are much more practical.

The United States have a very large financial interest in going after the tobacco companies, for those manufacturers can provide the means for immense economic revenues. This lucrative effort can expand world-wide, bringing in the US coffers thousands of billions of dollars in a few short decades, making up for failed social programs, political incompetence, as well as filling the non- profits' top dogs pockets.

Since we can safely assume that the attack formation and tactics are going to be the same as the well-tested USA-Canada arena, the enablers are going to be local antismokers organizations, financed in many ways by the US government via powerful non-profits such as the American Cancer Society. The money collected in those countries will return to the USA after the necessary laundering, the profits apportioned, and the difference recycled for more persecution. American lawyers are already meeting in early June in Bruxelles to study how to sue tobacco companies in various European countries.

The article goes on: ' "The magnitude of the tobacco epidemic is staggering," Murray says in the book -- a "global public health emergency," as his report notes, for which many countries are unprepared. '

While the simplistic, fear-mongering approach here is self-evident, not so is the impact that this attack may have on other nations. Unfortunately, many countries still see the United States and North America in general as some sort of "master race" or -- as one often hears -- "more advanced countries". The implication is clear: whatever comes from North America must be believable, since they are so much more advanced in the scale of civilization.

Beyond the fact that the United States are victims of delusions about their own superiority lies the reality that too many foreign countries confuse US military, financial, and propaganda power with the signs of true civilization. Unfortunately, from a social point of view, the US are more advanced only in violence, persecutorial techniques, and popular lack of education. That means fertile ground for public opinion engineering against minorities based on manipulation of evidence and repression of personal rights, including the right to pleasure.

Being a minority in North America often means marginalization, persecution, and isolation. This has been true for aboriginal peoples, blacks, gays, communists -- and now, smokers.

The article continues: ' "The Big Three multinational tobacco companies -- Philip Morris Inc., R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and British-American Tobacco Co. -- are working hard to spread this epidemic ... The three tobacco companies have become, along with energy companies, the biggest investors in the former Soviet Union -- where, Reynolds's then-chairman told a Moscow audience a while back, tobacco could be "a powerful force for improving the economic and social well-being." '

Interestingly, while antismoking organizations appear to work hard to eliminate tobacco, they never seriously propose to make it illegal. The reason for this apparent contradiction is easily explained: for as long as there is tobacco, there is the reason for the existence of astronomical financial gains for them, and their lawyers.

Every large mammal bears its parasites. The tobacco companies bear antismoking lawyers, while society bears antismoking organizations. Realistic statements like the one of Reynolds's chairman provide the necessary fuel for both their rhetoric, and income.

"In fact, no single nation -- not even the United States -- can solve its tobacco problem alone, as the Non-Smokers' Rights Association in Canada points out.", the article concludes.

While calling tobacco a "problem" is a well-known tactic of the antismoking racket, the obvious reality is that tobacco is an essential constituent of the world economy.

At planetary level, tobacco generates direct revenues worth about 1,000 billion US dollars a year, and employs tens of millions of people directly and indirectly, thus creating income tax revenues far exceeding the above figure. The wealth so created is used by governments for a variety of purposes, including economy development programs, social programs, education, arts, medicare, and more. We all know that smokers have shorter lives, and here comes the old truth that smokers don't draw against the social systems in their old age as much as non-smokers do. Moreover, due to the benefits of smoking, certain highly expensive, long-term diseases such as colitis, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's are reduced or eliminated.

Smokers should have good reasons to be proud of their contribution to society. Each Canadian smoker, for example, contributes about $25,000 in a lifetime to the coffers of the state. That means that the estimated 6.5 million smokers in this country contributed $162,500,000,000 (162.5 billion in today's dollars) in the last 30 years. The antismoking movement, on the other hand, has so far cost taxpayers billions of dollars, yielded only social disintegration, and no verifiable benefits to society.

And if we remove the manipulation of databases by dishonest scientists, physicians and politicians, the premature death toll of smoking is less than half of the claimed one, and certainly inferior to the one of pollution, malnutrition, malaria, drugs, and venereal disease, not to mention car accidents.

Thus, if tobacco were to disappear tomorrow, the world economy would nearly collapse. Everybody knows that, including the antismokers racketeers.

The only way to solve the antitobacco epidemic is to educate the world's public. This can be achieved by exposing their monumental misinformation at the media level around the world in the most aggressive way possible.

Because of the passivity and divisions of the pro-choice movements and tobacco industry, domestic antismokers have managed to convince the North American media that spreading anti- tobacco misinformation, while being silent on the other side of the issue, is a good way to offer a social service.

This information monopoly has insured the spreading of abhorrence of smokers among nonsmokers, the guilt of the smoker for his own habit, while keeping the smoker himself isolated, and in the dark about scientific/statistical realities, as well as on the size of his contribution to society.

The battlefield of tomorrow is going to be the world itself. The weapons are going to be smoker awareness, and media campaigns. Manufactured lies versus truths. Emotional hysteria versus reason. Liberty of choice versus regulatory oppression.

But this is not Hollywood. Unless smokers, pro-choice movements and even the tobacco industry find ways to work together to fight the aggressor with deadly force, the good guys will most certainly lose.

Gian Turci